Venkat Padmanabhan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he founded the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group in 2007. He was previously with Microsoft Research Redmond, USA for nearly 9 years. Venkat’s research interests are broadly in networked and mobile systems, and his work over the years has led to highly-cited papers and paper awards, technology transfers within Microsoft, and also industry impact. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and the inaugural ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time paper award, both in 2016. Venkat holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Computer Science, and has been elected a Fellow of the INAE, the IEEE, and the ACM. He can be reached online at http://research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/.
Road safety is a major public health issue, with road accidents accounting for an estimated 1.25 million fatalities, and many more
injuries, the world over, each year. The problem is particularly acute in India, with nearly a quarter of a million fatalities every year, i.e.,
20% of the world’s total. Besides the heavy human cost, road accidents also impose a significant economic cost. The crux of the
problem is that the major factors impacting safety — vehicles, roads, and people — have virtually no ongoing monitoring today.
In the HAMS project at Microsoft Research India, we employ a dashboard-mounted smartphone, and the array of sensors it
includes, as a virtual harness, with a view to monitoring drivers and their driving. We focus primarily on the camera sensors of
the smartphone, both the front camera, which faces the driver, and the back camera, which looks out to the front of the vehicle.
We address the challenges arising from our choice of low-cost generic sensors instead of more expensive specialized sensors,
the need for efficient processing on a smartphone, and demands of robust operation in uncontrolled environments. HAMS has
been piloted as part of a driver training program, with promising early results.